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Welcome to Northeastern University’s science and research blog. We call it iNSolution because that’s what our faculty and student researchers are in the business of—finding solutions to societal problems while simultaneously contributing to the fundamental knowledge base of their respective fields.

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The brain controlled Mars rover

It’s cool enough that people are making robots to crawl around Mars, but what if we could con­trol those robots with nothing but our minds?! Well, that’s pretty much exactly what North­eastern grad stu­dent Umut Orhan of assis­tant pro­fessor Deniz Erdogmus’ cog­ni­tive sys­tems lab did on Saturday.

Except instead of Mars, the robot was in Worcester. But still.

So…what in the heck is she talking about? you may wonder. Here’s the deal:

Erdogmus’ lab focuses on signal pro­cessing, machine learning, and their appli­ca­tions to con­tem­po­rary prob­lems in biology and bio­med­ical engi­neering. In one project, Erdogmus has teamed up with fellow assis­tant pro­fes­sors of elec­trical and com­puter engi­neering Gunar Schirner and Kaushik Chowd­hury as well as Worcester Poly­technic Institute’s robotics engi­neering pro­fessor Taskin Padir, to develop a Brain Com­puter Inter­face (BCI) for the pop­u­la­tion of func­tion­ally locked-​​in indi­vid­uals, who are unable to interact with the phys­ical world through move­ment and speech.

An alien life form hanging out behind a rock at the RASC-​​AL competition

A BCI is a pro­gram that turns elec­trical sig­nals from the brain (cap­tured through elec­trodes strate­gi­cally placed on the head using the cap you see in the photo) into com­puter com­mands. There are sev­eral ways of doing this, but one of the most pop­ular uses stim­u­la­tion of the visual cortex. A patient looks at a screen with a set of checker­boards each flashing at their own fre­quency and each capable of gen­er­ating a unique elec­trical signal in the brain. Padir will develop robots that can respond to these elec­trical sig­nals for the pur­poses of both com­mu­ni­ca­tion and self-​​feeding, two of the most impor­tant pri­or­i­ties for the locked-​​in community.

Another of Padir’s robotics projects is designing Oryx, a “plan­e­tary explo­ration mobility plat­form” (aka planet crawling robot or rover). For two years in a row now, Oryx has won the national Stu­dent Rover Design Com­pe­ti­tion held by NASA and the National Insti­tute of Aero­space. RASC-​​AL Robo-​​Ops, as the com­pe­ti­tion is called, asks teams of under­grad­uate and grad­uate stu­dents to design and build a rover and then con­trol it from a remote loca­tion to pick up rocks and “alien life forms.” Tra­di­tion­ally, Oryx is con­trolled using stan­dard key­board and mouse com­mands via wire­less computer.

But the research teams came up with an even better idea. Over the weekend, Erdogmus and Padir’s labs par­tic­i­pated in WPI’s Touch­To­morrow fes­tival of sci­ence, tech­nology and robotics by com­bining BCI with Oryx. Instead of con­trol­ling a robot that brings food to a locked-​​in patient’s mouth, they con­trolled the rover with the same tech­nology. This par­tic­ular project was spear­headed by grad stu­dent Hooman Nezamfar.

Orhan and one of Erdogmus’ post doc­toral researchers, Murat Akcakaya, holed up in a dimly lit room in the cog­ni­tive sys­tems lab on Sat­urday morning while the other half of the team enjoyed the sun­shine over in Worcester. With a streaming video from a camera mounted atop Oryx, the Boston duo could see what the robot saw. When they con­nected the BCI to Oryx over the 4G net­work, stim­u­la­tion of Orhan’s visual cortex trans­lated into move­ment com­mands for the rover.

Oryx in Worcester. The dudes in the back­ground are skyping with Orhan and Akcakaya, trying to remedy the net­work con­nec­tion failure.

There were a few glitches: the net­work was all sorts of clogged so there was a sig­nif­i­cant delay between Orhan’s visual com­mands and the robot’s move­ments, but oth­er­wise it was a pretty stellar thing to watch. Very slight move­ments in Orhan’s visual atten­tion (even his periph­eral vision) caused the robot 50 miles away to do its little dance for the kids and adults watching at the festival.

Orhan said that in addi­tion to ther­a­peutic appli­ca­tions, BCI could be useful for mil­i­tary pur­poses. “It could allow a pilot to con­trol a plane if his hands were indis­posed or inca­pac­i­tated,” he said.

About the Writer

Angela Herring is the science writer for the Northeastern news team. In a past life, she made fullerenes (aka bucky balls) at a small chemical company outside of Boston while freelance writing for the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, the Broad Institute and Novartis Biomedical Research Institutes. She earned her Bachelor's degree in chemistry and literature from Bennington College in 2005. In addition to writing stories for the News@Northeastern, she also maintains the university's research blog: iNSolution.

News@Northeastern is Northeastern University’s primary source of news and information. Whether it happens in the classroom, in a laboratory, or on another continent, we bring you timely stories about every aspect of life, learning and discovery at Northeastern. Contact the news team